I have a confession to make: I haven't actually written anything new since last year. I'd lost confidence and had pretty much decided to call it a day. However, the same compulsion that has been known to find me scribbling by torchlight at three in the morning led me to have one last try. I'd put Looking for Buttons on Amazon as a Kindle e-book and if no-one bought it, that would be the end of my writing career. To my delighted surprise, people are buying it. (Thank you!)
And suddenly I've started writing again. There's this blog and random appearances on Twitter as looking4buttons, and then, very late last night, I dug out part of the Difficult Second Novel. I read it with a little difficulty, as the only reason the laptop was still on was that I'd been lying in the dark to catch up with the fabulously titled Before the Screaming Begins on BBC iPlayer and hadn't got my glasses on. Even so, as I squinted at the screen, I realised it wasn't as bad as I'd thought. It was written so long ago I was coming to it fresh and I found I wanted to know what happens next (it would help considerably if I've got to write it). Better still, the narrator's voice was completely distinct from Looking for Buttons's Kate Harper. The book seems to be a runner after all.
Which puts me in a dilemma. Should I dust off the first ten chapters of the Difficult Second Novel and try to produce the rest of the book, or should I keep it on the back burner and carry on with the Difficult Third Novel, currently standing at a chapter and a half? The DTN is probably going to end up falling broadly into the romance genre, meaning I could pitch it to the Looking for Buttons audience, hopefully resulting in a book that sells. The DSN, however, is a thriller set in the 1970s, requiring a different pseudonym and a lot of research (watching re-runs of The Professionals is research, really it is, not an obsession at all, no).
I need to make a decision and soon. Inside my head I can hear Gladys Knight and the Pips singing Come Back And Finish What You Started. I can't decide if that's a sign that I need to take up the Difficult Second Novel once more or if my subconscious is desperate to hear a bit of Motown.
I think you should work on the novel you want to work on. And don't feel guilty about not writing for a while - sometimes circumstances are just not favourable. I always remember that Jane Austen wrote nothing for five years while she was in Bath, and she was a genius.
ReplyDeleteI think that's the only time I'll ever be in the same paragraph as Jane Austen. She was indeed a genius. I wrote an audio script about her a few years ago - http://www.kent.gov.uk/leisure_and_culture/libraries/books_and_reading/literary_walks.aspx Did a lot of work for the other two as well. Alas no writer's credit!
ReplyDeleteI'm coming to my summer break from studying so I'm hoping to attempt a little fiction, just to see how I get on.